Letter from the Editor

Hundreds have helped us keep Bay Weekly in your hands these 958 issues

Sandra Olivetti Martin

Nine-hundred fifty-eight issues in 19 years would be heavy lifting, were it not for all the people who’ve carried part of the load of Bay Weekly since our birth as New Bay Times on Earth Day, April 22, 1993.

I could tell you that the General Assembly, which adjourned this week, managed to spin straw into gold and everybody’s happy.
But you wouldn’t believe me, because you know that even in fairy tales there’s a heavy price levied on too much cleverness.
Truth is that nobody’s very happy with the results. In this Assembly, one diner’s meat has been another’s poison.

Mother Nature’s Got the Jump on Me
You and I will find them in this Bay Weekly

Sandra Olivetti Martin

“I’m in energy,” said the woman seated to my right at the long table where she and I, strangers heretofore, made conversation.
“Ah, so you’re following in Mother Nature’s footsteps,” I replied.
Magnetic energy — and no, not the kind new age healers use — was my table companion’s current favorite energy source, followed by geothermal.

In a state as old as Maryland — 378 years — historic tourism is big business. It’s like shows and shopping in New York, architecture in Chicago and monuments in D.C.
Unless history is your hobby, however, you’re likely to leave Maryland’s many historic sites to the kids, who do them at school. Or save them for visiting friends and family.

BGE has been wielding the grim reaper’s scythe in our neighborhood. Not only limbs aspiring to electric lines but whole trees have fallen. The wounds are still fresh. You can read the story of many a tree’s life in the map of concentric rings exposed on the raw stump.
The Fairhaven communities will be walking the roads this Saturday on their annual litter pick-up.
Those activist neighbors are one of my near circles.

Where’s the money going to come from? If you say no new taxes, what are you willing to give up?
To those questions, posed in my Editor’s Letter of February 23, readers had lots to say. Here are your replies, edited for succinctness.

Danita Boonchaisri, an aptly titled communications specialist with Calvert County, was once a student of mine. So our encounters, regardless of subject, are surrounded by a halo of memories. Insubstantial as ghosts, these memories are felt rather than seen. Would they reappear if we nudged them?
“Do you remember if Sue Lee was in your class?” I asked as we ended a call on a story for this week’s paper. The woman I named had just appeared, by the magic of email, out of time.

This day invites us to express the heavy burden of affection our hearts carry all year long

Sandra Olivetti Martin

Card companies are into their third century of making Valentine’s Day big business, and they’ll help us exchange millions of Valentines this year. But commercial mobilization doesn’t make February 14 a Hallmark holiday. It’s neither by accident nor artifice that we celebrate Valentines’ Day.
The urge is way stronger than paper or binary codes creating pretty pictures on a computer screen.